Copyright © 2005, by Charles L. Collins

Washington (AP) -– Department of Health and Human Services officials today warned that the continuing contamination of blood supplies nationwide could impact upon this vital resource. The shortage results from drug resistant strains of food chain and avian borne pathogens, as well as sexually transmitted viruses, said a high-ranking official on condition of anonymity. Some services already sighted as critical are emergency rescue, certain high-risk surgeries and injuries involving dangerous levels of blood loss.

DHHS has asked the pharmaceutical industry to re-double their efforts at finding suitable alternatives to fresh blood and plasma products. In order to meet this growing need, the secretary made clear that such substitutes must be easily preserved, mobile and safe. He also added that these products must be made available weighing the public need over profits. “The crisis is here, now, and the cost in human lives is too great to ignore,” he said at a press conference held today.

"Got to be good looking ‘cause he’s so hard to see."

- John Lennon

Prologue

Radio:

When I first started in this business, there was a guy, Dennis, who was supposed to be training me on working the equipment. This guy was old school in the extreme. Odd fellow, walked like his knees could bend equidistance in either direction. Never made more than thirty grand a year and if he ever got near a microphone, he’d put on a radio voice that would frighten dogs in three states. But Dennis loved the business and everything about it. He had no hope of getting a girlfriend without cash, check or money order, and even then she would insist that he laid a bi-yearly wash on his hair before she would touch him. And if he made eye contact with you for longer than three seconds he would start to sweat. Dennis must have been working radio for thirty years or more and one day he came in with a steamer trunk filled with tape. He was going to transfer the material onto CD. I asked him what it was and he told me it was every announcer he ever worked with mentioning his name. Mentioning Dennis’s name! I thought the guy was crazy, no, I knew the guy was nuts and told him so. Then I began listening to what he was doing. Hearing all those snippets of different radio personalities all taking a second or two, sometimes whole monologues just talking about this insignificant little engineer in the back room. He had some of the best known names in Chicago radio making him the brunt of a lame joke or mentioning how he screwed up or just saying good morning or good night to this poor schlub. And the look on his face as he played back this tribute to nothing, it was astonishing. It was then I learned the power of this little electronic phallus that now sits mere inches from my mouth. There is an unmistakable narcotic going on here that breaks us from our suffocating anonymity and gives us a general place in the grand scheme. It’s like taking a little thunder from God himself and having our name, our very being, materialize like dew from heaven. It is more than seductive, it is dizzying and we are constantly amazed at what people will do to join that club. Some will even commit the ultimate act and freely talk about it on the air. Some even provide us a front row seat. But none have taken it to the extremes of Malachi “Mudder” Reed. Even the Radio Murders were not prepared for the extent of the madness or, as Mudder himself said: “The Sun of Righteousness arise with healing in his wings.” Such a deadly dawn we have not seen, and hopefully, will never see again.

There was nothing good about the trip south for Cindy Flowers and her five, almost six-year-old son. Leaving her husband behind, wounded in a hospital room was so utterly counterintuitive that she barely noticed cruising past the familiar guideposts on I-75. Even Gerrod was in a semi state of shock. Traveling this distance was usually a family affair, with daddy trying his best to make it fun. There would be a stop at the big Farris wheel, a non-working version that was simply a giant ploy for one of the hundreds of fireworks stores along the way. Gerrod loved to look up at it from the base. He could never get so close to the working Farris wheel at Navy Pier, or any of the other places where he could find such a fascination. But dad was not guiding this trip, so he spent most of the time sulking in the back seat of Cindy’s Saturn. It was not a bad sulk; not the ones that were often accompanied by fits of strained cooperation. This was a quiet sulk, a scary sulk that in many ways was more annoying that any of his usual pre-school antics.

“I know you miss your father.” Cindy finally said to the frowning image in her rear view mirror.

“Yeah, but I’ll see him again.”

“That’s my little man. We’ll see him again.” Cindy’s eyes went back to the road, but not before catching an expression on her son’s face that rushed a small breath in her throat. It was a single shift of his youthful eyes; eyes that suddenly were no longer those of a child, but of some creature of great wisdom and foresight. She shook her head slightly and quickly, trying to get the message out of her mind, but it would not leave, I’ll see him again. Not we.

“Can we stop now?” The youngster did not seem to have an urgent need.

“We’re going to find a room soon, it’s getting late.”

“How soon?”

“I don’t know, half an hour.” Cindy smiled at her son, proudly without his booster seat.

“How long is a half hour?”

“About as long as one of your cartoon shows.”

“When I’m watching, it goes by fast, but when I’m waiting for them to come on, it’s a lot longer.” Gerrod counted the treetops as each took on a golden glow in the sunset. One, two three. “Waiting to pee-pee is even longer.” He bounced his head off the back of the seat and watched his mother’s face in the mirror.

“Okay, I guess we can take a little break. There’s a rest stop in a couple of minutes.”

“I know how long that is.” Back to the window, “I can wait a couple of minutes.” Jutting his little chin - Cindy could see his father in every angle – he made the most of the skewed view and imagined the rest. Occasionally he would lean to the base of the car window, as far as he could reach before stretching the limits of the shoulder harness, to scan the dipping foliage of green and brown, spiked by the tiny white and purple wildflowers that colored the north-south artery in summer. Once they were out of Ohio and well into the smooth wrinkles of the Appalachian preview, there was a rolling calm that encompassed the drive. The road never got into the real semi mountainous ranges of the Oak Ridge or the Blue Ridge or the Smokies, but there was enough cutting and curving to make it more than interesting for the inquisitive boy. “Mom, were there Indians here before the freeway?”

Cindy laughed silently and mentally dug through her kindergarten teacher’s lesson plans for the early tribes of the Southeast. “Lots. Mostly Cherokee. Did you know your grandfather has some Cherokee in him?”

“Yeah, daddy told me he was a surveyor and a lawman. Said his mom was full blood Cherokee, that was how he could get around in the woods without a map.” He rested his head again and looked at his mother’s blonde ponytail. “I bet I could get around in the woods. I bet I have enough Cher’kee in me to find my way home.”

“It’s Cher o kee, sweetheart, and I bet you do.” Cindy held his eyes in the rearview. “Just don’t ever try it without one of your parent guides with you.”

“I won’t, I’m just sayin’…”

The expression, just sayin’, was one he picked up from some of Greg’s friends, and it annoyed her to no end. “Promise me you won’t test those hidden Native American skills on your own.”

“I promise.” Gerrod closed his eyes. “Rest stop.” Cindy nearly missed the turn-off. With some effort, she was able to slow the Saturn and make the exit without disrupting the flow of traffic.

The sun set slowly, leaving a colorless pall over the unimaginative landscaping and out-parcels of hastily constructed buildings. The concrete, steel and glass lean-to was populated by machines filled with empty calories on spring loads, and one lone figure perusing the selection. Cindy made a mental note of the man and it convinced her that her son was going back to the ladies room, no arguments. It had been months since they had to repeat the ritual and budding humiliation was forming in his miniature personality. He refused to go in the stall with her, compromising by holding her door which stayed partially blocked only by the arms length spread of the yard-tall sentinel. It must have been a slow travel season, she thought, not many families on the road on this mid August evening. Saturday after sundown, most people were where they wanted to be, she surmised. But there were a few cars in the lot and a spattering of big rigs in the rear, parked lattice-like and giving the whole place a low hum of suspended commerce.

“Mommy, can I go to the men’s room?”

“Absolutely not, not without your father.” Cindy missed Greg more than ever. There were pangs of regret as she recounted the way she left his hospital room. ‘Jesus school,’ what a heretic. The pejorative was his way of resisting the suggestion of attending a Christian marriage retreat. Still, the thought brought a smile to her face. Greg Flowers was not one to follow traditions, but he was one of the most Christian men she had ever met. It was not something he spoke of or even put into some form of personal philosophy. It was just the way he was: generous and kind, motivated by helping, not reward. She wanted to turn the car around at the next opportunity and stick by him, no matter how much he protested.

“Look! There’s nobody here.” Her son persisted.

Just like your father!

“You can wait right outside and I’ll keep talking to you the whole time.” His little voice pleaded.

“You know the rules.” Gerrod was never alone unless they were inside their home on Church Street in Hyatt Indiana, an affluent, far villburb of Chicago. That was firm. In spite of the invented word, Hyatt was more village than suburb, with estates growing like moss on the edges of flat, former sod fields and delineated by small manufacturing related to the easy shipping lanes of the Great Lakes. It was a nice place to raise a family. No matter its failings, its bigotries and elitism, and the recent path of carnage that started in one of the nicer neighborhoods of Hyatt and directly prompted her journey south, it always came back to that: A nice place to raise a family.

“I will count. I can count as far as counting can. I will! You can hear me!” The child started squeezing his crotch and crossing his legs at the upper thigh. Cindy weakened.

“Start counting.” She looked around at the empty portico and released her young son’s hand.

“One, two, three…” The numbers echoed off the glazed, gray stone, interrupted only by the slap of the spring mounted stall door. Nine…ten…” Her son was having trouble squeezing out the numbers, competing with the force of his tardy bowels.

“I want to hear you. I mean it.” Cindy aimed her head and her voice up and into the restroom, holding the door as she spoke. That’s when she felt it. Felt him!

“’Scuse me, ma’am.” The man stood nearly at the spot where she was propping the door, his large hand grabbing its edge as he spoke. He looked at her with a grin of perfect teeth, Britewhite and capped, she guessed, framed by the all-to-common oval of brown hair around his mouth.

“Can you give us just a minute?” Cindy smiled, feeling at once at ease by the man’s freshly pressed red cowboy shirt, complete with collar tabs and a black bola tie.

“Why sure I can. Little guy in there all by himself?”

She hesitated and looked around the open section of the rest area. Where did he come from?

“Fifteen…sis-teen.”

“Sis-teen, ain’t that cute. What’s he, five or six?” He was not letting go of the door.

“He’ll be out in just a second.” Cindy looked to the bathroom interior. “Hurry please.” The bubble of human waste and disinfectant floating from the other side of the door burst on the stranger’s clean smell and, she guessed, expensive cologne. You’re starting to scare me!

“Listen to how nice you are. My momma would’a yelled her head off, threatened to start the car and pull off without me.” He released the door and leaned on the wall, his back scraping the rough-cut stone. His hands fell, hidden by his narrow hips. “Boy’s got a real pretty momma, too. Nice and pretty.” The Britewhite was not so friendly, and took on a sinister look.

“Please, mister, my husband’s a policeman and he’s in there with our son.”

“Twenty one, twenty two…”

“Now that don’t surprise me, that your husband’s a cop. But I seriously doubt you standing vigil for a grown man.” One hand moved from behind his back. Cindy hadn’t breathed normally for sometime, as she recalled, and now the breath was sucked in with no place to go.

One, two, three.

“Gerrod! Run! Code Seven, Code Seven!” The man’s hand sprang from his side and against her throat.

“You must be the wife of a cop. Teaching your little boy toad language, the tongue of the Beng! The words of the ZOG!” He closed his fingers around her neck and pulled her from the door. “I don’t hurt kids, Chaldean harlot!” It was a death grip on her larynx, clean and professional. He pulled her farther from the doorway, careful to stay out of sight of the chorus line of semi tractor-trailers and forced the movement to the far side of the building.

Then, the blade. She saw it when he pulled it from someplace behind him. The tip was at her neck and pressed beyond the point of pain.

“I will stand my watch and set myself upon the rampart.” The blade pressed in, breaking the skin. Cindy’s eyes opened until the blue, white and tiny – but growing - strings of red flooded with tears.

“Prgnt!” the muffled sound came from under the hand he held to her mouth, his elbow pressing her breast and holding her to the wall. He spread his fingers a little, allowing her lips the tiniest bit of movement. “I’m pregnant! You said you don’t hurt kids!”

“And watch to see what He will say to me…” the man’s look collapsed in pain and concentration. Her words hit him hard and he pressed the knife deeper, closer to the jugular vein, drawing blood that ran slowly down the nickel plane. “The music, harlot mother. The vibration! We will play the reed and you will be cleansed.” Tears formed in his distant eyes, the oddest shade of brown, almost maroon in their wildness. “For the stone shall cry out from the wall,” he whispered, “and the beam from the timbers will answer.”

The knife plunged into her neck, and she felt the cold pain invade. Slowly? Then, suddenly, surprisingly, he pulled the knife from her body and held it to her fading eyes. “You hear the music, harlot? See the reed glows pink. Drop one. It plays the recessional, the freedom from your third soul.” Drop two. He stretched out hear and reed and freedom in a soft sing-song, almost preaching; the third soul weighed heavy on his tongue and frightened his victim more than did the metallic slide into her neck. Drop three. “Now, tell me my dreams, and you shall go free.” Cindy did not know it - the pain and unthinkable finality of where the blade had gone, what damage it had done beneath the early warning nerves, was paramount – but his thumb was over the wound, barely stopping the burgundy gush.

He’s crazy! Cindy looked away from the blade, still coated with her blood, she could feel the rest pour from her neck. Somewhere, anywhere. Her eyes drifted, any sight was preferable to his contorted face. She saw the shadow of her son, standing on the path and watching; his face, emotionless and steady, came into view.

It was all she needed. The knee came up and slammed into his groin. She held it there, gathering strength until she could rock forward, the muscles in her neck screaming fiery agony, but there was enough sinew to smash her forehead into the bridge of his nose. The attacker was dazed and he released his hold on her neck, pulling back from the wall. The premature, post-murder arrousal had begun and the pain of the sharp knee was intensified by the condition of the target. Again, she kicked, this time from enough distance to drive her suede clog into his lower abdomen, fainting satisfaction registered as she vaguely saw him buckle at the waist and drop to his knees. Cindy slid from the wall, sideways toward Gerrod. The blood was coming with more force and she knew he might have nicked the artery. The Artery!

She was fading. Gerrod ran to the men’s room and pulled as much toilet paper as he could from the roll. He returned and pressed the wad to his mother’s neck.

“I love you, my little man.” She grunted, “Your father too, tell him.” Her voice was unrecognizable. Gerrod noticed that the man who had done this to his mother was gone, and so was Cindy’s Saturn, which had been the only vehicle in the car-only parking lot. The five-and-a-half-year-old jumped up and screamed around the building toward the line of trucks. Two women and a man got out of separate cabs. One of the women, big and plaid, grabbed a first aide kit from some unseen place and rushed back with the boy. Cell phones flipped open and other cabs emptied, all coming to the rescue of the blood-starved woman and her brave young son.

Part One - Patient Zero
Metafreaky

Friday, August 8,
One Year Later

"I told 'em flat out, I ain’t serving no niggers!" Chicago Detective Jerzy Stempowski, Stemp, looked up from his notes and over the rims of his reading glasses. He knew the incendiary word would not get a rise out of his partner, but he had to look anyway. Had the words emanated from a body, a real person rather than a time-slipped digiprint preserved by a series semiconducted ice trays, then things might have been different. "I said I'd bring 'em they's food if I had to. Maybe I catch a sneeze on the way to the dining room, add a little 'o my own nutritional value to they's eggs, y’know. Long as I ain't got to talk to 'em or make like they's my equal." Malachi “Mudder” Reed was more than happy to talk on the radio. The detectives were not surprised that Bill Crash Kradich had taped the parts of the conversation often carried on after the show had ended.

“There was this night manager, Fat Teddy.” The small silver box continued. “He was on for the first couple hours of my shift. Big, fat sloppy nigger that one. I had this great way of calling him boy without his stupid nigger ears ever hearing what I was doing. Like I would say, Teddy, boy it was sure busy this morning, or Teddy, boy that cook sure messed up a bunch of orders. Stupid son of a chicken strangler never knew what I was doing.”

“Son of a chicken strangler?” Freddy Blakely puffed. “Where’d this guy come from, a lost episode of Hee-Haw?”

“I find him endearing, as far as serial killers go.” Stemp sat back with a loud undertow of a groan in his breath. “I’ll admit it, Mr. Kradich, I have listened to your show and find the segments with Mudder here pretty compelling.”

“Most do.” Kradich reached out and barely touched the box, sliding a tiny button and silencing the ramblings of one of his greatest finds. “He always seems to have something interesting to say, besides his avocation.” Kradich, a year sober and just getting over the growing pains of coming face to face with the consequences of arrested development, was worried about his star player on the national radio show. Mudder had started talking about ‘buying a field,’ which Kradich came to believe he was contemplating another killing.

“The bible references are astonishing.” Stemp said.

“No they ain’t.” Freddy insisted. “These creeps always try to find some justification and eight out of ten times it’s in the First Book. Hell, I can start and stop my research into psycholand after reading one passage of the Old Testament. If I believed half of it, I’d probably be a nutjob, too.” Stemp knew his partner was qualified to make such a statement. Fredrico Blakely had nearly memorized both books. It was not from devotion – to hear him tell it - but a necessity if young Freddy was to avoid his mother’s wrath.

“So far we thought, Dani and I, we thought he was just an imaginative southerner with a gift.”

“A gift.” Freddy let the words flop on the conference room table like last year’s telephone book.

“Detective, you have no idea how many people call this show, any show, without the slightest notion of how ridiculous they sound. And the worst part is it isn’t even entertaining ridiculous, more like painful ridiculous. It’s up to me to either find a usable vein to mine or cut them off.”

“From what I hear it’s usually the latter.” Step looked around the recently revamped conference room.

“Correct. No sense wasting time panning a dead stream.” Bill Kradich had undergone a remarkable transformation since the series of events that brought the three men together. It was a year nearly to the day when his brother-in-law was found dead in a Southside park and his sister, the only real family he had, was thrust into madness that resulted in a number of murders. It was those unfortunate events that gave him the idea of a national radio show devoted to murder; real-time murder much like the ones that inadvertently became part of his broadcasts during his sister’s killing spree. Kradich was even the victim of a gunshot wound to the upper pectoral region, an injury that still limited his movement and served as a constant reminder of the consequence of playing fast and loose with fire.

“Now you believe otherwise?”

“I’m not sure. There’s something a little frightening about some of our conversations.”

“A little frightening? Son, you’re believing your own hype if you think this guy is anything but the real deal.” Freddy was convinced that the man on the mini-disk was capable of unspeakable deeds. “And I have to tell you, by giving him a stage, you’re encouraging him to do what he does to stay in the spotlight.”

“Freddy’s right. This is exactly what a sociopath like Mudder wants, an audience.”

“I’m not so sure. Like I said, I’ve had lots of killer wannabees on the air. This guy seems to be asking for help.”

“If he wants help then we have several, well marked location and we do take murder walk-ins.” Freddy twisted his face, still not over his dislike for the talk-show host.

Kradich looked at the exasperated expression on the round, hairless detective’s head and reached back for the silver box. With a slide of a small button, he brought the recording to a different place in the conversation.

Mudder: You believe in confession, Crash?

Kradich: Saved my life.

Mudder: Confession is the work of The Deceiver, ain’t nothing about it in the real word of God.

Kradich: Maybe so, but it beats carrying around all that garbage…

Mudder: Now you’re talking meeting talk. I been to those cults. They’s as good as the Baal, the Zionist, trying to change a man’s nature.

Kradich: The Baal?

Mudder: If you don’t know, I ain’t teachin’. Not tonight. You can walk around being led by your third soul if you want, but I’m ready to ascend, ready to join the masters and desert this Chaldean army we all been recruited in.

Kradich stopped the disk. “Sound familiar?”

“I’ll be goddamn.” Freddy said.

“We can’t let Greg know about this, not yet.” Stemp looked at his partner.

“Why the hell not? He’s been looking for this guy for a year!”

“That’s precisely why we can’t tell him.” Stemp stood, his dark suit looked cheap and badly in need of a competent dry cleaner. “Those old testament references are not a fingerprint. You said yourself that more than half the poor, misguided souls who cross our desk are somehow getting instructions from some bible code, real or imagined.”

“Well,” Kradich stood, “I just thought you’d want to be brought up to speed. We have trapped his numbers, as we do with all our more interesting callers.” A sheet of paper was slipped from the top of a stack of papers. “The only way this works is if we keep up our end of the bargain.”

“It’s the only way you and Dani stay out of jail.” Freddy needed a vertical push-up to return to his feet. Kradich could not help but notice how much weight he had gained since their first encounter.

“We’ll follow this up.” Stemp looked at the phone numbers and recognized the exchange as being from pre-paid cell services and probably useless. “Even if he’s not the guy from the rest stop, I’ll bet he’s unleashed his vitriol on someone somewhere.” Stemp held out a hand to Kradich, who grabbed it with a single bounce and held a strong connection for two seconds.

Freddy did not offer his hand, but extended an upward chin before turning to leave. “Like what you’ve done to the place. Looks like another half mil in decorating and equipment.” The large detective stopped and looked back at Kradich. “Murder been beddy, beddy good to you.” He pulled an archaic expression from first century Saturday Night Live.

Kradich winced, “I suppose you could say that. It helps to get your head out of the bottle and the dopeman’s pocket.”

“Yeah, good luck with that.” Freddy joined his partner at the door. “For us, it’s the same thing. Not enough time, not enough money. But business gets better every year.” He shot Kradich a knowing, humorless smile.

“We’ll be in touch.” Stemp removed his glasses and folded them into his handkerchief pocket.

“The voice.” The answerer was uncomfortably honest. The question was: Why?

“Greg, you can’t be serious.” Stacy Crenshaw, private citizen and private security consultant, was sitting at her desk in Schaumberg, Illinois. She hadn’t talked to her friend and short-lived lover for three months.

“I wish I weren’t so shallow, but yeah. It’s just not hers anymore.”

She listened and unconsciously rubbed the area where her flesh stopped and the polymer began. Not hers? She wondered if a scientifically crafted body part could ever morph into the whole, the former utility it was designed to replace. “There was a lot of damage.”

“You don’t know the half of it.” He looked at the clock on his kitchenette wall. 2:30, almost time for Gerrod to come bounding up the stairs and speed to his computer, flinging backpack and jacket in random trajectories. “Listen, I gotta go. G-man’s almost home and I got to get ready for the watch.”

“Call me, Greg, anytime. Anytime.”

“Sure, Stas. Thanks for listening.” He pressed the off button on the cordless receiver harder than needed to terminate the call. The black plastic bounced off his forehead in frustration, why did I call her? He knew the answer, but was not ready to be quite as honest with himself as he was with his friend on the phone.

It was the damaged and harmonically coupled voice that finally led Greg to let go. To stop trying to make a family out of three severely compromised people. One with a near fatal injury, not unlike the ones he had suffered in the line of duty, only Cindy Flowers’ wound had a far more lasting effect than limited mobility and constant pain.

“Hey dad!” As advertised, the six-year-old darted through the door – left open in anticipation of his arrival – and moved straight for the computer that was set up in the small living room.

“G!” Greg shouted, “how was school?”

“Cool. Didn’t get into any scrapes or nothing.”

Greg winced at the double negative. It had been four months since they relocated to the city and he was still not comfortable with the mangled language his son was learning from his peers.

“Anything.”

“No scrapes or anything.” The screen jumped to Gerrod’s page, complete with his own child-friendly portal and e-mail. “Randy’s sending me some pictures from his vacation, says they’re whack.” A finger corkscrewed into his nose, the crusty contents dug from beneath the index fingernail with a lower canine.

“Cut that out. That’s nasty.”

“Sorry. Here they are!” Gerrod sat back and stared, his expression suddenly moved from childlike to sullen.

“What’d ya got there?” Greg moved to the screen. The image was innocent enough, a family picnicking at a conglomerate stone table. He could see Gerrod’s friend, Randy, with a hotdog stuck in his nostril and his mother, oblivious to her son’s antics, smiling away in the sunshine. “What is it with little boys and noses?” Then, he realized the shocking nature of the snap. The meal was taken at a rest stop along some westward highway, but the construction and layout was eerily similar to the crime scene the then detective from Hyatt, Indiana was allowed to visit a year earlier. He punched the monitor off button and gently squeezed his son’s shoulder. “Better get started on your homework,” he whispered. “Ginny will be here any minute.”

“I gotta pee.” The small voice took on an adult quality; something that happened, Greg noticed, when the child was confronted with a reminder of the attack. Gerrod pushed back from the computer hard enough to tip the chair, the fall to the floor stopped only by Greg’s quick reaction, accompanied by a nail-sharp reminder in his right shoulder.

The NUB

Stacy Crenshaw hung up the phone and looked at the neatly stacked papers on her desk. She wondered when she became so organized and fought the urge to toss each stack in the air and let the multimillion dollar clients figure out their own security flaws. Boredom seeped, oozed from those pages and it was difficult to stop. The chair easily pulled from the light oak desk and she pounded her space-age foot on the floor, locking the mechanism that allows her to ratchet into standing and walking mode. It had been more than nine months since she was fitted with the leg, time enough to birth a baby, and just as temperamental. She was able to run, maneuver with some ease and she even tried dancing, but the surgical steel and efficiently shaped polymer made wearing a skirt out of the question and her walk was noticeably stiff and a little awkward. Still, the founder and senior investigator for Cadmus Intel, and former captain of detectives for the Chicago Police, was more than capable. She just did not feel that way at the moment.

The wall of windows in her twelve hundred square foot office looked out onto the sterile nests of buildings, the expressway and the huge blue and yellow Ikea showroom and warehouse. She watched the rhythm of the vehicles taking the curve in the exit ramps, providing a bass-line for her thoughts, and so I quit the police department, the song pinged in her head, and got myself a steady job. The view was nothing like the perch at the 103rd street Division; looking over Trumble Park and the hard working people in the Southside neighborhood, but it was her choice to remove all reminders of a difficult and painful time. That pain is what prompted the move to the western suburb and the disability retirement from the force. She still had occasion to work with the CPD, most of her international clients had offices in the city and it was difficult to get anything done without knowing the inner workings of The Machine. Chicago has always been and always will be a dynamic example of perpetual motion fueled only by relationships and trust in - or at least a healthy fear of - one’s opponents. Since the death of her father and the case that netted headlines for six solid weeks, Anastasia Crenshaw became a household name and something of a local hero. The events coinciding with the launch of Bill Kradich’s Radio Murders certainly aided in cultivating the urban legend. In Chicago, that kind of notoriety was as good as gold.

Cadmus Intel had an office in Florida, and Crenshaw had visited the Clearwater location earlier in the summer. It wasn’t really an office, rather a bayside condo on the small strip of high-rises and exclusive homes called Sand Key. It was not difficult for the corporation to purchase the tenth floor, three bedroom luxury suite and designate it an office. Crenshaw made a special appeal to the zoning board and the board of trustees of the building, providing a free security analysis for the residents and a sweetheart arrangement with the city and the Pinellas County Sheriff to help out on difficult cases. One such case prompted a visit in 90 plus heat and humidity. Stacy was beginning to think she got the worst end of the deal.

Without realizing it, the case file was in her hand and flapping at the leg of her pants, the right side, where there was plenty of air between her thigh, the prosthetic and the fine fabric of her dress slacks. She instinctively picked it up when she pulled away from the desk; the thoughts running to the events so far away and her concern for her friend seemed to have a thread of non-locality. Stacy learned long ago that there were things she did not understand at work when strong human emotions are applied to violent acts. Nearly all violence, especially the kind that causes one human being to harm another, contained some level of emotion; greed in the hired killer being the less connected, but love was intrinsic. It was this connection that made Crenshaw uneasy and more than a little off balance, as though her leg - the one she had come to trust as a numb member of the family of extremities - was no longer able to support her full weight. Borrowing a term from her academe father, there was more than a little metaphysical mumbo jumbo about the stabbing assault of Lenin Páva. There was profound sadness and injustice about the crime. Stacy could not help but link the case residing in her organized and compartmentalized left brain, with an emotional corner in the right brain reserved for Greg Flowers and the stabbing of his wife. She was ashamed to admit it at the time, but there was a forbidden glee felt when the news of Cindy’s attack made its way to her hospital bed so long ago. It was Greg himself who told her what had happened. Standing with some time-slip clarity, she remembered how she comforted him. People and tragedy equal screwing. Her personal mental PowerPoint moved quickly, seamlessly to a time when an eight-year-old Anastasia found something shocking in her father’s sock draw. Zuri, her best friend was over for the night. As young girls do, there was a quest to find something, anything in the smoky adult world that would fuel imagination and send them off to far away places filled with princes and romantic adventures. The old photo was double rolled, scroll-like and stuffed in a corner of the drawer. It was something - she later discovered - that was created by and passed around among the grad students at the university. The caption was academic enough, “As Rome Burned,” but the crudely drawn images were far from the normal lessons of history: rows and rows of men and women, exaggerated penises finding their shaggy marks in as many poses as the amateur cartoonist could imagine and fit onto an eight by ten sheet.

Planes in their glide path to O’Hare filled in thoughts about her friend Zuri, “lovely” in Swahili. And though Stacy was half of African decent herself, Zuri was one of the few black friends she ever had. The little girls grew into accomplished young women. Stacy recalled the excitement in her voice when she told her of the job she landed in one of the most prestigious NGO’s in the country, with headquarters on the 92nd floor of One World Trade Center. Stacy tried to believe that her friend’s excited announcement was the last time they spoke. There was no place in her organized and generally dispassionate dominate hemisphere to store the conversation, the actual last conversation, that happened that morning. The cell phone call went something like this:

Zuri: Hey.

Stacy: Hey yourself, what’s happening?

Zuri: Nothing, they have some kind of fire on one of the lower floors. We were told to stay at our desk, but the phones are off, so I thought I’d blow in a call to my best friend in the central time zone.

Stacy: I’m your only friend in the central time zone. Hey, the buildings are on CNN. You say there is a fire?

Zuri: I guess. What’s the news saying?

Stacy: (long pause) They aren’t sure, but it looks pretty bad. You’re on what floor?

Zuri: 92nd. The whole building sort of rocked, but that happens when you’re up this high.

Stacy: (long pause) Can you get out of there?

Zuri: They told us to stay put.

Stacy: Seriously, is there any way to get down?

Zuri: What’s the matter? You’re freaking me, girl. (Loud commotion) Oh shit! I gotta go! I’ll be all right. Talk to you.

That was the last she heard from her Zuri. More time-slip freedom of thought intervened, I wonder if she found somebody when she realized… Not enough time had passed for her to complete the thought. There may never be enough distance from that morning. The fragment that did appear was enough to make her nauseous and ashamed.

She and Greg did not screw that night; the night he found out that his wife had been stabbed at a Tennessee rest stop. She wanted to, just like she wanted to when her father died of a heart attack right in front of her. When he heard that Cindy was attacked they came close, but not quite, to making love that very night, while she was still being prepped for the operation that would change her body and her life forever. It was as much a shock to her as it was to him, but she insisted that taking advantage of such an upheaval in his life was not the right time, and a hospital bed with her dying left leg suspended in a medical erector set was certainly not the place.

The phone beeped quietly on the open desk. Pulled from distant images, she looked at the soft green unit with its blinking light. Why do people do that? Look at a ringing phone. The ring alone told her it was the private line. Stacy wondered if it was business or personal, then demurred with the realization that her life had become all business. No one knew the number who was not in some way associated with law enforcement or one of her many contract operators. Stacy winced at the fact; she had no friends.

“You still on speaking terms with Kradich?” Stemp forwent the greetings and got straight to the point. It was his way of having a conversation continuum, interrupted occasionally by other people and other things.

“I guess, though I haven’t talked to him in a while, what’s up?”

“He’s got a guy, Reed, Malachi Reed, calls himself Mudder. Pretty interesting profile.”

“What do you mean he’s got a guy?” Stacy maneuvered back to her chair. The name, Malachi Reed was one she knew well and would never forget.

“Guy who calls that creep show of his. Talks like the fourteenth apostle from hell. Assuming hell has a branch somewhere in the hills of Kentucky”

“Nothing new about that. What is it Crash calls them, guys who call up confessing to everything from 9-11 to the Kennedy assassination? Meta-flakey?

“Metefreaky.”

“Whatever. I don’t have time for Crash’s nonsense. You know he just wants to give legitimacy to his little crime starters exposé.”

“This guy mentioned the Chaldean.” Stemp waited.

“Really? In what context?” Stacy wanted to tell Stemp of the case involving Lenin Páva and her estranged, knife wielding husband, but waited.

“Says he was in the Chaldean army, ready to desert, mentioned Baal, too.”

“You think there’s something to this?” She flipped open the case file for the assault on Lenin Páva, and moved the pages until the crime scene photos were spread out in front of her. “There are a lot of Old Testament smite you down kind of psychos out there.”

“Yeah. But there’s something to his voice, the way he speaks, has this transplanted southern accent. I’m sure it’s affected to some degree. Hard to pin down.”

“Have you spoken to Greg?” Stacy leaned forward, focusing on a floor shot near the place where most of the stabbings occurred.

“Not yet, thought we could track him on his shift, probably running down one of a million B&E’s. He’ll enjoy the diversion. I’ll let you know how it goes.”

“Stemp,” Stacy could sense the pending hang-up. “Let me tell him, after I listen to Crash’s tape. It might be important for something else I’m working on.”

“Only for you, captain.” The hang-up came, on schedule.

The photo, like most of the information in the case file was supplied by the Pinellas County Sheriff and the Clearwater Beach police chief. The thought of the latter gave her a visible shiver. Lieutenant Denton Luka was one of those characters Stacy could do without; a Buck Milligan of the beach - as she imagined him dancing about in a discarded Joyce draft - wandering the dunes with one hand on a beer and the other on his privates, looking for trouble. If not for the sizable income resulting in the consulting contract initiated and renewed by the NUB, she would not waste a nighttime cell minute on the man. There was more than one occasion when the stubby cop made a special effort to have Stacy in on a case just as an excuse to get close to her. She found him disgusting, perfectly despicable, and more than a little preoccupied with questions about her prosthesis. There was no proof yet, but she had little doubt that he was an amputee fetish. For that reason alone she wanted as little to do with him as possible. Considering him a NUB was her way of defusing the situation and keeping Luka in his place. It was a small thing she learned from Herman Jeffries, her former boss, former flag officer in the submarine fleet and now Lt. Governor. In a world that embraced acronyms, Nonqualified Useless Body was one of the most useful. She shook off the imagery – with some difficulty – and went back to carefully examining the photos. “What else were you doing?” she whispered into the photo. Aside from the cast-off that hit the ground as the man was working his nightmare on his ex-wife, Lenin; there were three drops of her blood that seemed out of place, three lonely drops. The forensic blood analysis concluded that the three drops were low-velocity impacts, formed by blood dripping from a height of about five feet. But the drops were small compared to normal drips from a wound or normal sized surface. The conclusion was that the blood dropped from a narrow surface, possibly the tip of a blade, and fell to the floor by no more force than gravity itself. “What were you doing, Mudder, while poor Lenin bled nearly to death?” She sat back and rubbed mid-thigh, the material soothing the small separation where she ended and the artificial her began. “Now you’re calling radio talk shows. What gets you off, you sick fuck?”

Skokie

“This is Mudder, calling from Jewtown USA.” The line was silent on the other end. Malachi “Mudder” Reed knew what the hesitation meant: the call bank was empty and the nervous host was running out of personal anecdotes.

“You say your name is Mudder?”

“Unlike that charlatan of a host you have in the other room, Iah don’t stutter. The name is Mudder.”

“Hold on. You’re next up.”

There was no surprise that Reed would get through on the local Des Moines station. He had been on hold long enough to get the point of the host’s subject and would add an opportunity for vitriol; the fuel of any talk radio show, especially one devoid of talent.

Radio:

Host: We have Mudder from, it says here Jewtown. Welcome to the Frank Raymond show.

Mudder: Hello Fred, thanks for taking my call, I just want to say y’all right about the coloreds getting outta control. But you can’t blame them…

Host: I suppose you are of the mind that black people are like animals and should not be expected to behave any differently. And the name is Frank, you ignoramus.

Mudder: Now you said that, not me. I think they know exactly what they’re doing and it’s all designed to start the war.

Host: The race war? You a Turner Diary freak, are you Mudder? Another one of those sick stars and bars wavin’ bottom feeders with the mind of child, groping through life looking for another Hitler to take you to the promised land…

Mudder: Hitler was no prophet, my friend, just a very clever creator of the mass media. You have Hitler to thank for your insignificant employment t’day.

Host: If I thought that had even a hint of truth I’d go back to shoveling out the pig sties in Ottumwa.

Mudder: Better lace up the hip boots, Frankie, ‘cause that’s the gospel. It was a man named Goebbels that was the father of PR and mass hypnosis. He was the one who recreated his boss into a historical megalith and led to the unification of Europe. Somethin’ y’all think is so noble.

Host: Listen, I don’t have time for your Nazi crap, you are just like all the rest of them…

Mudder: But I’m not, I am sitting right in the heart of Jewish America and am here by choice…

Host: (angered) Just another Skin-headed brown-shirt.

Mudder: Okay, now who’s resortin’ to name callin’? Let me ask you Franklin, who said, ‘I think the Jew is probably sharper intellectually than the average gentiles because for years and years he’s had to live by his wits. Who said it, Frank?

Host: I don’t know, Shimon Paris?

Mudder: George Lincoln Rockwell, in conversation with the Negro Alex Haley for Playboy back in the 60’s.

Host: Remarkable, that doesn’t change your stripes, or should I say your crocked cross, you stinking Nazi…

Mudder: Now I’m not saying Rockwell was any great thinker, but he sure opened my eyes.

Host: We can all tell you’re quite enlightened.

Mudder: I don’t agree with what Hitler did to the Jews, I think that was one thing, perhaps the only thing he got wrong. Shoulda left the Jew alone, co-opted him if he had to, and made more room for the sodomites and Gypsies in those camps.

Host: a Nazi who doesn’t hate Jews, now you got my attention.

Mudder: It’s the wrong enemy, Arabs, too. They are just the children of the Chalde.

Host: The children of the what? The raghead?

Mudder; We are being manipulated, just like the German people were. And it’s all in the book, the Bible tells the whole story, but if you think the Jews are the problem, then you have to tacitly reject the Old Testament, and when you do that, you miss everything.

Host: You gonna start bible-thumping on me now?

Mudder: I’m looking out on the New Jerusalem, Franklin. This is where it all begins and ends.

Host: Ohh kay. Listen, psycho days are Wednesdays on the Frank Reynolds show, so I’ll talk to you then, ahh bye-bye.

Mudder: You’re a fool, Reynolds.

The line went silent as Mudder held the phone to his ear, smiling. He was not certain if the last retort made it to the air. If he were within signal range of the rural station he would have quickly turned up his radio to catch the last seven seconds of the exchange, post delay. But he was well out of reach. The large reel-to-reel tape recorder slowly threaded black-backed polyester strips from one sprocket to the next. Mudder flipped the lever to REW. ”I’m looking out on the new Jerusalem…” the tape stopped mid-sentence with another flip of the lever. Mudder smiled and let the cordless receiver drop to the sofa. The seven inch, diameter reels were half full, documenting various conversations with hosts around the country. Mudder slipped the two tapes off the spindle and gently placed them atop a box marked “Local/Midwest.” He checked his watch. 5:15pm. There was still time to make other calls; calls to other desperate hosts in cities where he could only hear the shows while waiting on hold, or in some cases over the internet. But he decided to put on his most treasured tape log and wait. Wait to call Crash.

Until fairly recently, Malachi Reed hated the nickname “Mudder.” Prompted by one humiliating incident and reinforced by his stepfather, it was never intended as a compliment. W.C. Quantrill Burke married Malachi’s mother, Naomi, after a small, weekly American miracle; one that changed only the surroundings and circumstances, not the people. It was nothing for the large, musk-steaming heavy drinker to point out Malachi’s shortcomings; including his dull, beige teeth, borne of poor nutrition and shoddy hygiene. Growing up on a dirt farm in central Kentucky, Malachi and his mom were always on the edge of destitution. “We were so poor that the coloreds used to bring us offerings,” he once told a local talk show host, careful to characterize his neighbors in what he thought would be a more acceptable term. But the comment still got him unceremoniously dropped from the air. Mudder was thirteen then, and never got over the public embarrassment. But the experience of hearing his voice on the air and having the attention of hundreds, maybe thousands of listeners, sparked the dormant tender. It was then he decided that the radio was to be his canvas, his skywriting. Malachi Reed thought he had plenty to say and a phone call and a little careful planning was all he needed.

He stared at the expensive yet strangely outdated reel-to-reel component, oddly human in its mechanical configuration; huge, sightless eyes recording moments in time, excited oxide magnetically adjusting as it slides through a fixed smile. Moments that will mean something to history, if only I were famous. Next to the tape recorder was an elaborate computer station, a nineteen-inch flat screen monitor and wireless keyboard and mouse. The CPU was out of sight and only breathed its electronic whine from an unseen cubby below the work area; noticeable in the quiet of the large room. Mudder adjusted the chair and sat down, dropping his head back and making ghost images out of the white stipple swirls in his ceiling. His neck was sore and he had only eaten two slices of bread and some peanut butter all day. The pit of his stomach tightened into a fist and his hands strangled the wooden arms of the chair. The feeling snatched him from the chair. A few clicks of the keyboard called up a RealPlayer playlist on the large screen. Twenty-three titles stacked the colorless window, all with one thing in common: Gypsy somewhere in the title. He hunched at the shoulders and clicked a third of the way down the screen to a song from 1970 by a never-say-die band named for an obscure Dickens villain, Uriah Heep. Runs of dirty electric guitar riffs filled the apartment, louder than the voice audio from the tape machine, but emanating from the same five speakers and girded by a carpet of booming vibrations.

When I was only seventeen, I fell in love with a Gypsy Queen

Mudder remained hunched over the keyboard.

Her father was the leading man, said you’re not welcome on our land…

Lenin Páva was his gypsy queen, and he closed his eyes tightly around escaping tears. The guitars pounded in his head and he straightene